MPLS Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) is based on instantiated Maintenance Points (e.g., most often by configuration). Maintenance points are called Maintenance End Points (MEPs) or Maintenance Intermediate Points (MIPs) depending whether they are located at the end or in the middle of an MPLS Label Switched Path (LSP), respectively. OAM operations occur based on the exchange of packets between these points. The sole means of reaching a particular MIP via the data-plane is to properly set a time-to-live (TTL) value in an OAM message such that the packet expires at that particular desired MIP. Thus TTL values must be specifically known and configured. There are two drawbacks to this approach, however. First, it is prone to errors, such as due to manual misconfiguration. Second, it is static, and it does not respond to changing hop distances within the network to a particular MIP. This in turn places certain restrictions on the types of LSP repair that can be performed. Namely, MIP to TTL mappings cannot vary, thus the means of providing reroute are limited to those which preserve the number of hops in the LSP.